So you're a huge Buckeye fan living in New Jersey. You get the scarlet Mercedes. Add a Buckeye license plate holder. Now, you need just one final thing to make this the ultimate Buckeye mobile: a Tosu-centric vanity plate.

Since you live outside Ohio, you have more choices. You come up with the perfect one (no, "FUCK MICHIGAN" doesn't fit and isn't acceptable - even in Jersey). Yes, it's available!

You wait. And when the plates finally get there, you can't get them on fast enough.

In the wake of Tressel's resignation and the ongoing scandal swirling in C-bus, the MZone has learned that Ohio State will be changing their traditional logo - "Ohio State" across a block "O" - to something a little more honest.

Monday, May 30, 2011

In the wake of Ohio State coach Jim Tressel's quitting before he got fired resignation, we put a few of our favorite posts about the scandal in one convenient place for all your linkage needs.

You're welcome.

Sincerely,

The MZone

SCRIPT O-LIE-O!

TRESSELGATE DOUBLE FEATURE

And back for a special return engagement:

TRESSEL-I-AM

Two weeks ago - before Yahoo! Sports posted a story claiming that Ohio State football coach Jim Tressel knew about Buckeye players trading merchandise for free tattoos more than eight months before the school said it was made aware of the allegations - The Vest was photographed reading Dr. Seuss books to a group of school children in Ohio:

Well, in light of the recent allegations in C-bus, may we suggest the following for The Vest's next reading to the kids:

An excerpt:

We looked!Then we saw him step in on the mat!We looked!And we saw him!Terrelle and his tats!And he said to us,"Why do you sit there like that?I know it is wetAnd the sun is not sunny.But we can have lots of funLots of fun with booster money!"

"I know some good bars to go to,"Said the QB."We can drive in the new carThe new car dealer just loaned me!We will take the car, take the car out for a ride.My coachDoes not care, so I have nothing to hide!"

Then Sally and IDid not know what to say.But Terrelle said Coach TresselWould look the other way.

But our fish said, "No! No!Make Terrelle go away!Tell that Cat with the TatsYou do NOT want to play.He should not be here,He should be on probation!He should be suspendedWith the rest of Buckeye Nation!"

"Now! Now! Have no fear.Have no fear!" said the QB"I won't get caughtSince my coach just ignores me.Why, we can haveLots of fun doing my thingWith a game that I callSelling my championship ring!"

An excerpt:

I do not like the game's laws and its rulesI do not like them, they're only for foolsI did not like them during the days of ClarettI do not like them nor have been busted just yetI let Terrelle Pryor get his free tatsThen claimed, "Oh, I did not know about that!"I do not like the rules they have about classThe N-C-A-A can kiss my Vest-wearing assI do not like the rules out on the fieldAnd if we get busted, I'll surely appealI do not like the rules here in the 'ShoeAnd our fans do not care as long as I beat the BlueI do not like rules here or thereI do not like them ANYWHERE!

In the MZone exclusive below, we have obtained a copy of the heavily edited rough draft of the last "Conclusion" paragraph of that letter. As you'll discover, significant changes were made before it was submitted.

The institution was wondering when the other shoe was gonna fall regarding the charade that is Cheaty McSweaterVest. How the hell it took this long is beyond us is very surprised and disappointed in Coach Tressel's lack of action in this matter. His behavior in this situation is par for the course out of character from him and is contrary to his proven history of saying one thing in those bullshit self-righteous books he pawns while doing another behind the scenes of promoting an atmosphere of NCAA compliance within the football program. Since this shit has been going on ever since his hiring as the head football coach in 2001 (i.e. Maurice Clarett, Troy Smith, etc.), he and his staff have ignored attended the NCAA rules education sessions on a consistent basis, regularly made up sought interpretations, and self-reported an almost laughably huge fuckload of nearly 400 secondary violations. His lack of truthfulness action in this matter appears to have been the result of thinking he was above the rules and wouldn't get caught as usualindecisiveness regarding the appropriate actions to take in this specific situation in which he was placed if you can even begin to wrap your head around what a huge set of stones it took to even try to pass that nonsense off as a plausible excuse, as opposed to a blatant disregard of NCAA legislation stretching back to his Youngstown State days. Nevertheless, we recognize that because he wins a lot of games and beats Michigan, we look the other way when we can and offer the insulting slap on the wrist punishment in this letter now that he should have forwarded this information in some manner to appropriate institutional officials. With the exception of this mistake that you know about, he is a man of integrity and high moral standards if you set the bar somewhere between, say, Pete Carroll and the SMU program during the Eric Dickerson years.

This institution really hopes you'll buy the ginormous load of horse shit in this letter in the same way you shockingly believed the whole 'Cam Newton didn't know' steaming pile appreciates the cooperation of your staff in this inquiry.

"After meeting with university officials, we agreed that it is in the best interest of Ohio State that I resign as head football coach. The appreciation that Ellen and I have for the Buckeye Nation is immeasurable."

Friday, May 27, 2011

Michigan athletic director Dave Brandon said further expansion at The Big House could lead to a capacity of 120,000 people. Brandon said nothing is definite and it all depends on if the wait list for tickets gets large enough and it's affordable for the school.

According to the Detroit News story linked above:

"One thing I'd love to do is close in at least one of the ends," Brandon said. "The south end of the stadium is the place we would start.

"If we were to take the bleacher system up to the top of the (new) scoreboards, which would be even with the elevation of the east and west towers … it would take the total capacity of the stadium up close to 119,000, maybe 120,000."

Not exactly sure how I feel about that. Part of me is like "cool" while another part wonders is another 10,000 bodies inside the stadium (and their cars outside the of it) a good thing? A what point does it start to negatively affect the gameday experience?

My biggest beef is that no matter how big the stadium gets, the ticket prices will continue into the stratosphere. I think it sucks ass to know that even if they were to squeeze a million people in there, they'd still continue to charge folks $70 - plus the @#$% seat license fee! - to see Michigan sodomize EMU.

Thursday, May 26, 2011

Yeah, Yeah, Yeah... old news for the Ohio State Football program these days. The real shocking story out of Columbus this morning is the fact that Ray Small is actually attending classes, something he very rarely did when he was a member of the football team. In fact, we here at the MZone have obtained an exclusive image of Ray Small going to class this morning.

According to the Ohio State Student newspaper The Lantern:

In his four years in scarlet and gray, Small – who is back at OSU pursuing a degree in sociology – totaled 61 receptions for 659 yards and three touchdowns. He returned a fourth-quarter punt 69 yards for a touchdown to seal a 26-14 victory against Ohio University on Sept. 6, 2008. Small spent time on the practice squads of the Indianapolis Colts, Minnesota Vikings and Washington Redskins.

In case you have not seen the story with the other boring stuff about program wide rules violations and omnipresent buckeye discounts, check it out here. As you are reading this, keep in mind: the NCAA rules are stupid, everyone is doing it, you are just jealous, these kids are poor and need tattoos & nice cars, Jim Tressel loves his players and was just trying to protect them, and Michigan sucks.

USC claimed in its appeal that the penalties were excessive. Yeah, well, so were USC actions during the Carroll years.

The Trojans will lose 30 scholarships over the next three years, won't be eligible to play in this year's Pac-12 title game or a bowl game, and upperclassmen can still transfer to any 1-A school without having to sit out a year as is the norm. According to USC head coach Lane Kiffin, this last penalty amounts to "free agency."

Seriously, Lane? Wow. Takes a giant set of stones calling this penalty "free agency" considering the way you treated your commitment to Tennessee. Huge set.

The rejection of USC's appeal doubly sucks for Kiffin and crew as I seem to recall they had been recruiting normally, hoping the NCAA would lighten the penalty load.

Oops.

And I can't imagine they're feeling too good in C-bus upon hearing this news, either.

The NCAA president recently said they're going to crack down harder on cheaters. With the mighty Trojans unable to get a better deal upon appeal, one has to think the NCAA isn't going to let Tosu and Tressel get off by letting The Vest simply miss a couple meaningless early season games that they'd win even if they let Woody's corpse call the plays (and don't even bother bringing up the meaningless "fine" assessed against Tressel).

Tuesday, May 24, 2011

Last week, former Michigan football coach Lloyd Carr was elected into the College Football Hall of Fame. Carr joined not only Michigan coaching legends Bo Schembechler and Fielding H. Yost in the Hall, but other icons of the game such as Bobby Bowden, Paul "Bear" Bryant and Knute Rockne.

There are some who might even say this second achievement is more of an honor - and more impressive - than the first.

In any event, if you're a media outlet that covers Michigan sports, especially U-M football, these two events - that were announced the same weekend - are not only an obvious story but, I'd dare to say, a must cover. A no brainer.

As such, Carr's selection to the HOF and the Mott honor were covered by the local news broadcasts, the Detroit and A2 newspapers, as well as written up on severalMichigan blogs. Heck, we even came out of of our off-season semi-hibernation and deviated from our tired timely posts about The Troubles in C-bus to put up something.

But the one place you didn't find anything of note on either of Carr's two honors was on the biggest Michigan football - and to my knowledge, biggest college football - blog in America: MGoBlog.

Somehow the most-read Michigan football blog - by a wide, wide, wide mile - didn't deem the selection of the third winningest coach in Michigan football history to the sport's Hall of Fame worth a post.

In May.

Oh, it was mentioned on the main page a couple days after the fact. Here:

I can't recall how I got to this article from The Daily (not that Daily: the Rupert Murdoch one) on Lloyd Carr being a nice dude who's in the Hall of Fame hurrah. In thirty seconds the generic newspaperese will fade from my brain, but I'll always remember the time I went to that site to read an article that was a half-meg 768x3072 image and marveled at how random the selection process for executives is. I know it's an iPad app and all but raising a giant middle finger to Google is maybe not the best policy.

I'd call that "damning with faint praise"...if indeed it were praise, which I'm not sure it is.

Look, I get that MGo didn't-slash-doesn't like Carr. Fine. That was clear when he was coach, clearer still when Rodriguez was in A2 and continues to be oh-so-clear to this day. But to not even cover the above accomplishments, to pretend they didn't even happen - on the biggest, most read Michigan blog in the country - borders on petty.

I don't understand it. It's impossible to find a former player who says a bad thing about the man. There was never a hint of scandal during his tenure. He won five Big 10 titles in 13 seasons and the school's only national title in 60 years. Yet the disdain seems almost personal.

Was he a perfect coach? Of course not. No coach is. And we were just as critical as anybody after The Debacle.

But MGoBlog's anti-Carr sentiment feels like it even bled over into the coaching search-slash-hiring of Brady Hoke (who was on Carr's staff). It seems every compliment toward Hoke is backhanded or prefaced with an "I don't mean that as an insult" disclaimer, every great move explained away as simply "not screwing up." Which isn't surprising considering that after Brandon named Hoke as head coach, MGo had this to say:

This is a stupid hire. It will always be as stupid hire and David Brandon just led the worst coaching search in the history of Michigan football. He managed to chase off half of an already iffy recruiting class, hired a Plan C coach on January 11th, probably ensured the transfer of the reigning Big Ten Offensive Player of the Year, and restricted his "national search" to people who'd spent at least five years in Ann Arbor. Michigan just gave themselves a year of USC-level scholarship reduction voluntarily.

Well, not only did the "Plan C" coach a) not chase off half the recruiting class nor b) ensure the transfer of the reigning B10 OPY nor c) give themselves a USC-level voluntary scholarship reduction, but such slams feel especially hypocritical in the wake of those who were often lambasted on MGo for not being "all in" for Michigan's coach even after the program posted back-to-back losing records for the first time since black and white TV - let alone before the latest hire had led so much as a single practice.

The post quoted above went on to say:

A completely average coach should be able to take 20 returning starters on a 7-6 team that sees the schedule ease considerably and get to 9-3. That's good, because that's probably what we hired.

I'll ignore the "damned if he does, damned if he doesn't" trap behind that statement for a second to simply say that if Brady Hoke goes 9-3 this season, he should be named Coach of the Year. Period.

Look, there's a reason MGoBlog is the biggest U-M-slash-college football blog around - it's damn good. It provides the most in-depth Michigan football coverage on these here Interwebs, always has new content and is really funny to boot.

I read MGoBlog regularly.

I'm also a fan of Brian Cook, the site's founder, curator and blogger extraordinaire. He was our first guest on the old Internet radio show Benny and I used to host and very supportive during The Cowherd Thing. There's a reason he was able to ditch whatever job he had to follow his passion and turn his love of Meeechigan into a career.

But the continued Lloyd bashing-slash-Hoke-hating-slash-kinda-grudgingly-giving-him-the-benefit-of-the-doubt-for-now stuff is, well, beneath him and his site. For better or worse, due to his site's size and influence, MGo is the Michigan blog of record and Brian is the Peter Parker of Michigan blogging. And with that great power comes great responsibility.

Friday, May 20, 2011

Thanks to the loose lips of Brian Kelly, everyone knows Michigan and Notre Dame are going to be wearing "throw-back" uniforms when we play on September 10th. The real question is what will these new/old uniforms look like?

This morning Brian shared a "leaked" image from the Free Press. Yikes. Let's hope that the fine folks at the Free Press worked as hard on this one as they did researching what counts as practice time and adding up all practice/stretching hours the Wolverines in 2008.

It didn't take long for the fine folks at Chris Creamer's Sports Logos Community to work up a bunch of options to show what this could look like. HT to Chris Creamer contributor JJSCOTT for putting this together. I don't much like the shoulder and arm stripes, but for one game, I can live with it. Of the three here, I like #3 best. Please, Please, Please don't use the "neon yellow" version of maize in #1.

Every now and then, one of our readers sends us something so perfect for the MZone, we can't get it up on the site fast enough.

Case in point is the pic below from Jon (aka @MonkeyWrench32 on Twitter). It's one of those reader submissions for which a mere "HT" or simple "Thank you" hardly seems adequate.

Actually, it was difficult even typing the "Thank you" above. You know, due to the coffee still coating the keyboard and computer screen after the spit-take.

Behold...

I Ohio Ohio?

I know what you're thinking: Somebody did this to their body?! On purpose?!

This tattoo is so egregiously bad, I'd almost think it's some photoshopped fake. But we are talking about Ohio. And they do have, shall we say, a "thing" for their tattoos there. Although, even if it was free like most tattoos in C-bus, this dude (I hope it's a dude) got ripped off.

ED. NOTE: It took me a couple viewings of "I Ohio Ohio," but I just realized I wasn't looking at someone's belly. I kept thinking as I looked at the picture, Maybe this is fake. I don't see the belly button. Where the hell is belly bu-- Ohmygod.

And yet "I Ohio Ohio" is only a mere appetizer to the humdinger below I stumbled upon while working on this post. Take a gander at "Ohio, Bloody Ohio."

And this one I know is real because there's a video of it getting done.

Yes, America, somebody is walking around with that on their body. Who, you ask? According to the tattoo website where I saw it, "This bloody ohio tattoo was done on my good friend Tara at this years Hell City in Killumbus, Ohio."

Monday, May 16, 2011

At the fundraiser for Mott Children's Hospital over the weekend, Brian Griese revealed that former Michigan head football coach Lloyd Carr will be inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame this year. Carr joins such U-M coaching legends as Fielding H. Yost, Fritz Crisler and Bo Schembechler in the Hall.

During his 13 year career at the helm of the Maize and Blue, Carr went 122-40, won five Big Ten titles and one National Championship. Off the field, he raised millions of dollars for Mott and was adored by his players (even without free tattoos or too-good-to-be-true car deals).

So while some in the M blogosphere will probably mark this occasion with a really elaborate pie chart post blaming Carr for Rich Rod's troubles, the country's economic woes and the crash of the Navy SEAL helicopter during the Bin Laden raid, we here at the MZone wish to congratulate this class act and great football coach.

Inspired by the latest crisis in Columbus, this one involving used cars, Hollywood has rushed a new movie into theaters this week. Luckily, the MZone was able to obtain an exclusive look at the poster.

Thursday, May 05, 2011

for those of you who remember last summer's "trick shot montage", which included a pic of my Ford Escape in the foreground of the "golf club a bball thru the hoop" shot (which appeared on ESPN), here's this spring's follow up, from ohio stadium.

Monday, May 02, 2011

I just read the article on Andy’s buffet about making Tressel stay and not firing him. I had a thought when I read it and wanted to pass it on.

Excerpt from the article:

A few years ago Troy Smith, the Ohio State Heisman Trophy winner, admitted he had received improper benefits from boosters.

Tressel claimed no knowledge.

Before that, running back Maurice Clarett said in an ESPN The Magazine article that the coach, other members of the Buckeyes staff and Ohio State boosters were guilty of numerous N.C.A.A. improprieties, including providing him — and at times others — with free loaner cars, bogus jobs that paid well and passing grades for classes he did not attend. Nothing came of the accusations, and Clarett wound up in prison for crimes unrelated to football.

Then there was Ray Isaac, Tressel’s quarterback at Youngstown State. Isaac ran into trouble with the N.C.A.A. because he received improper benefits, including money and the use of cars.

Tressel, again, said he knew nothing, though Youngstown State eventually admitted to wrongdoing and accepted minor penalties.

Blogging about college football just seems so unimportant in the wake of events last night. Hence, we take a break to thank the brave members our military who carried out the daring raid to kill Bin Laden. We'll return to our regularly scheduled blog when we stop chanting U-S-A!

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